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  Grouse Hardware still had a pile of wheelbarrows stacked up out front that might be the same stack old man Jasper had rolled out there each morning since she could remember, but they also had a riding lawnmower parked in the next-to-the-door place of pride. She tried to think who in town had a big enough spread to justify a riding mower—coastal lots tended to be small and grass rarely thrived in the heavily salted wind. Then she realized that the town was growing older. The Judge’s hair had mostly gone silver. Cal Mason Sr., in the diner eating his tall stack, was even rounder and balder than before. Maybe there was more demand for things like riding lawnmowers.

  Jessica glanced worriedly at her mom, but she looked the same. Some lines around the eyes and mouth, but they made her look like she smiled more rather than less which Jessica knew to be true. With her good eye for clothes, and her automatic slap that dropped her cell phone into the hands-free mount every time they got in the car, Mom definitely looked in charge. However, Jessica’s journalistic eye didn’t miss that even in July, Eagle Cove Real Estate wasn’t too busy for her to run up to Portland to fetch her errant daughter.

  Mom wore her hair shorter than she had a decade ago, a neat, chin-long cut that looked good enough on her that Jessica might have to try it next time she cut her own hair. Of course Jessica also wore her own hair shorter than a decade before, so maybe that change didn’t count for much.

  The center of town stretched six blocks from the docks to the Rusty Pelican, the town’s dive bar in both senses of the word. The Pelican looked even more disreputable than usual. Alistair Thomlinson had clearly found even more gewgaws. An import from Cornwall, he was fascinated by “beach décor” beyond even cliché. The tired porch was curtained by a line of battered fisherman floats hanging from a beam. Old crabbing pots, a mostly deflated rubber raft, fishing poles, and chunks of driftwood added to the look. His pièce de résistance had always given Jessica the creeps. It was an old style dive suit with the sagging rubber body and the bulbous helmet now rusting in the coastal air.

  Maybe she was okay with not being here so much.

  Mom and Dad had taken to visiting her for the week between Christmas and New Years wherever she was—decreasing her need to come back. The first year in Chicago had been so bitterly cold, that they’d sworn a family pact to never make that mistake again. Washington, D.C. had been a little better the following year.

  Since then they’d met in different, warmer locales until it had become their new tradition, working right across the bottom of the country: Key West, New Orleans, Austin, Phoenix, and a hilarious holiday at Disneyland and Universal Studios. The fact that Mom and Dad were divorced for that one hadn’t diminished the fun in the least.

  The first divorce had shocked a nine-year old girl to her very soul. Family was supposed to be forever. She knew because both her mother and her father had told her so. Mom hadn’t gone far. At all. She’d moved through their home’s breezeway into the mother-in-law unit that Granny Lamont had never occupied—she’d fallen for a Costa Rican millionaire and called herself his eighty-year old, bikini-clad squeeze. Her Christmas cards were invariably just that, the two of them on a gorgeous tropical beach in skimpy enough attire that the main thing they were each wearing was smiles.

  Her mother, in staking her claim to the mother-in-law unit, had taped the divorce decree to the glass door that connected the two parts of the house. That first decree had been covered over with a marriage license after less than six months.

  Jessica had been less shocked when the second decree covered over that in her junior year. Their shortest of the three divorces, the piece of paper that covered it was dated less than three months later. When her mother had declared she was done with him but good on Jessica’s thirtieth birthday, Jessica had asked just one key question.

  “Where did you put this time’s divorce decree?”

  “Why right over the top of that cursed third wedding license. I don’t know what I was thinking when I remarried that man.” The fact that it had lasted thirteen years this time and she hadn’t moved completely out of the house since the day she’d moved in thirty years before was so irrelevant that Jessica didn’t even bother to comment on it. Someday she’d find a man, housebreak him, and move in with him. Not a chance was she going to go to all the waste of doing paperwork to keep him.

  Jessica’s decision not to worry had been reinforced by the fun family vacation in southern California as well as when the three of them had made plans for Hawaii this next winter. They were already joking that Fiji would be the next stop after that, though Mom had temporized with maybe spending a Christmas at each Hawaiian island before going so far afield. It was just as well, Jessica’s vacation fund wasn’t likely to reach even to Hawaii.

  But she wasn’t going to think about that.

  Past Jane’s Warbler Market, her Mom turned onto LBB Lane.

  “Your father has a group of tourists out on the boat fishing for the day—you might recall that it’s inshore halibut season. He promised to try and be back in time for dinner. Meanwhile, I thought we’d get you settled in at Gina’s.” Jessica’s old bedroom, with her blessing, had long since been turned into her mother’s fitness room.

  LBB Lane had always been one of Jessica’s favorites. The town had been platted by a mother-daughter team. The Book(let) History of Eagle Cove—actually a double-sided tri-fold sheet of letter-sized paper run off on the Town Hall copier but bearing a grandiose title—listed them as amateur ornithologists. As if there’d been so many “professional” opportunities for women in an 1890s coastal fishing village.

  What the brochure didn’t say, though the local scuttlebutt definitely did, was that mother and daughter couldn’t stand each other. So they’d divided the town in half. Everything toward the ocean from Beach Way had been decreed for Mother Mason to lay out, which she’d done with the names of all of her favorite land birds. In retaliation Daughter Mason had chosen seabird species for everything in her control, from Beach Way to the forest. Unwilling to risk the ire of either, who were apparently both elemental forces, store owners cautiously named their businesses for which side of the main street they were on. Land bird businesses stood on the ocean’s side of Beach Way and seabird-named ones roosted on the side toward the forest.

  But a dozen streets on either side of Beach Way were all that would fit between the sea and the narrowing of the river valley back up toward the pass. Mother Mason, in a fit of despair at not being able to include so many of her favorites, had made the last road LBB Lane. Little Brown Bird Lane covered finches, wrens, tits, juncos, and a whole gamut of others even if the proper name wouldn’t fit on a street sign. The lane had been extended with time until it became the longest street in town. It ducked down close to the sandy beach before climbing south and up on top of the basalt cliffs. A straggling, graveled one-lane finally ended at the long-since automated and incongruously named Orca Head lighthouse.

  Jessica had somehow forgotten how breathtakingly beautiful the beach and cliffs were, though they were the least changed of anything in Eagle Cove. Just a block off Beach Way, LBB Lane took a sharp left turn to the south and ran along a bank that stood a dozen feet above an amazing stretch of sand. No Florida or California beach could compare. Those were tamed, crowded with condos, or fenced away in tiny sections for rich people’s personal enjoyment.

  Almost the entire Oregon Coast had been grabbed for the state by Governor Oswald West back in the early 1900s. It had ruined his political career; but it had also guaranteed that the beach would remain unspoiled and accessible to all. There was a wildness to it that she’d never seen anywhere else.

  “Stop! Mom, stop the car. I have to—” she didn’t know quite what came over her. She was wrestling the door open even before the car was fully stopped.

  In panic, Mom stomped on the brakes and the door nearly slammed forward out of Jessica’s grasp.

  “Sorry, I just—” Jessica tried to apologize as she jerked her seatbelt free. Out of the car, she c
lambered down the bank over the big rocks and a couple of driftwood giants that some massive storm had cast up high on the beach. The former were scrubbed clean by hard wave action and the latter were dark brown, stripped of their bark by the same relentless pounding of the waves that eventually had delivered them.

  The beach south of the Eagle River’s outlet was a stretch of feldspar buff-yellow sand with streaks of darker iron from the erosion of the basalt cliffs to the south. At low tide, like it was now, the beach was fifty yards wide and a couple of miles long. High tide would shrink it to ten yards and chop it into three or four sections—depending on the height of the tide—divided by rocky headlands that stretched out from the shore.

  She shed her sandals and dug her toes down into the cool sand. Even on a sunny day, the sand was rarely hot along the coast. And a few inches down, a layer of cool dampness eased it even further. The waves were small today. Rollers of just three to five feet fell on the beach with a deep-throated sigh of relief. Having traveled across thousands of miles of ocean from Alaska, Japan, or Hawaii, they had reached their goal and arrived with a thump of joy and a sand-slapping high five of a job well done.

  Jessica closed her eyes to the bright sun glinting off the white of the breaking curls and simply breathed in. The air, cleansed by a hundred storms as it crossed the wide Pacific, tickled her hair about her neck. Gulls nattered as they debated whether it was time to walk the beach as dignified as stout old men waddling off to the pub or should they fly out past the waves to ride the gentle swells up and down through the pleasant afternoon. Any sounds made by the tourists on the beach were whisked away before they reached her.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so affected by the ocean,” her mother spoke from close beside her.

  “I—” Jessica didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t that she’d missed the ocean. She’d been at a conference in St. Petersburg just two months back, but it hadn’t felt like this. Her reactions were backward anyway. St. Pete’s had bath-warm water and languid waves that lapped a few inches higher when it was high tide; a thoroughly enjoyable place to lounge and swim.

  The Oregon beach was all about character, tough character—often as not it tried to kill you. The water driven by the Japanese current and coming down from Alaska was so bitterly cold that in mid-summer a person’s life expectancy still could be counted in minutes—a dozen or so. Riptides dragged logs and tourists out to sea every year. Up in the more heavily touristed sections like Newport and Lincoln City, they lost a half dozen tourists every summer.

  Surfers flocked to these beaches, and the incautious ones were battered against reefs of volcanic rock even less forgiving than coral. Tides climbed ten feet up and down the beaches marooning the incautious beachcomber in rapidly narrowing coves surrounded by harsh cliffs.

  To the north of the outlet of Eagle Cove, a great sea stack of dark basalt smeared white with bird guano rose from the thrashing waves. It was home to cormorants, common murres, and, most popularly, to over sixty pairs of puffins who came to Eagle Cove each summer for the breeding season. They favored deep rocky burrows high on the big sea stack just offshore from the outlet of the Eagle River. It was July and they’d be there now, each nursing their single egg. Soon the pufflings would break out and mayhem would reign up and down the length of the cliffs.

  Jessica knew every nuance of this beach, even the fact that it never stopped changing from day to day. A strong wave came up the beach, but the tide was out and it didn’t quite reach her.

  Why had it taken a trip to Eagle Cove to realize that her Chicago career, if not in shambles, was not doing well. The days of merely being a good journalist was no longer enough. You needed a blog and a powerful, multi-threaded social media presence. She was paid to write for a living, but now she was supposed to give her writing away for free so that she’d accumulate enough of a following for someone to pay her. Totally backwards.

  Besides, it wasn’t working. The new car had gone on hold. The condo of her own was still stuck in a roommate budget—that was even after her dreams had diminished to a small condo. Takeout was Moon’s Sandwich Shop or a slice of Chicago deep-dish rather than The Cotton Duck or a table at Antico. The flight to the wedding would be a budgetary strain that would take a month or more to backfill.

  “It’s all messed up, Mom.” Jessica hadn’t even known that was true until she said it aloud.

  “I know, dear.”

  She turned to her mother, “You know?”

  “Of course. Just because I’m fifty-five doesn’t mean that I wasn’t ever thirty-two. At least I wasn’t single— Oh, sorry about that, Jessica. But it’s true, even though that’s how old I was the first time I divorced your father. You were nine and I woke up one morning and couldn’t understand how I’d ended up still in Eagle Cove and married to him.”

  “But Dad was always a good man, wasn’t he?” Jessica dug her toes deeper into the cool sand that was rapidly making her feet cold despite the warm day. Of course a warm summer’s day on the coast was barely seventy degrees; Chicago had hit ninety-three by the time she’d gotten on the plane early this morning.

  “He’s the very best, which is why I married him.” Then her mother offered one of her wry smiles. “That’s why I married him every time.”

  Jessica looked back out to sea. She’d never met a man who was “very best” and after playing the field in a dozen different cities across America and a few in Canada, she’d become convinced that such a man didn’t exist out there.

  And as if she’d needed Greg Slater to remind her, such a man certainly didn’t exist in Eagle Cove.

  Greg set out the ingredients for a simple roulade sponge base of flour, milk, butter, and eggs. He separated and whisked the yolks and set the whites to beat in the mixer.

  The Puffin Dinner was now closed and quiet for the day. He loved the peace of cooking, only one light over the stove and another over the prep table. The dining room was shielded from the midday sun by the deep porch and let him imagine its shadowed interior just waiting for the eager crowd to come.

  Once he had the roux built, he folded in the egg whites, but the oven wasn’t up to temperature yet. He could afford to wait a few minutes.

  For the filling he mixed together some Italian Parmesan cheese and a couple cups of the goat yogurt that Tiffany made on her farm up in the woods. Her boyfriend had dragged her to Eagle Cove a couple of years back. They’d bought a chunk of property back above Orca Head that no one in their right mind would want, including her boyfriend. He left her there in the teepee they’d erected together and driven off to parts unknown. Tiffany had stuck. She’d cleared land, planted a garden, and bought a pregnant goat and a pregnant sheep.

  It always surprised him each time she showed up in town. She’d come walking in—because it was her truck the boyfriend had driven on his way out of town—wearing worn corduroys, a flannel shirt, and a big straw hat atop her waist-length soft brown hair. She’d also wear a backpack sometimes with little bottles of goat milk, sometimes with containers of huckleberries or perfect heads of lettuce.

  Tiffany mostly talked to herself, but they were lively conversations. And at times when Greg had been buying some of her products which were always fresh and well made, he overheard enough to learn that she was quite funny, often laughing at her own jokes.

  The one time he’d joined in on her laugh at a particularly funny observation about seagulls’ mentoring habits for their young, she’d stopped and studied him with dark eyes from beneath the wide hat. Then, she’d pocketed the money, not nodding her thanks this time (which was a fifty-fifty proposition at best), and wandered down the street to the hardware or grocery store before walking the two miles to the end of LBB Lane and then a mile or more back up into the forested hills behind Orca Head Lighthouse.

  Greg dug parsley and scallions out of the walk-in fridge and began to chiffonade them on the maple chopping block. The only sounds were the quick snicking sound of his knife and the occasional ping fr
om the oven’s warming metal.

  There was a lot of speculation among the townsfolk about what they’d find if they went up to Tiffany’s farm. The few adventurous souls who had tried quickly learned that she was a crack shot with a bow and arrow which discouraged any active interest, if not the idle speculation.

  Nicky Vance had bought himself one of those high-end camera drones for himself last Christmas.

  “I’ll do flyovers for Mrs. Baxter’s real estate listings, and adventure videos for the whale tours and fishing trips. This sucker will pay for itself in weeks,” he’d patted it proudly on the head.

  On his first town flyover, he flew a circle around the Orca Head lighthouse. Then he decided to see just what was going on up on the cleared patch in the forest beyond. They’d all been huddled around him when he flew toward Tiffany’s place. There had only been two really clear images. The first was a wide open clearing with animal pens, though no sign of a teepee or other house. There had been no time to zoom in before the second clear image was captured and transmitted back to them from the small onboard camera. The last frame of video the drone ever captured was the head of an arrow the moment before it hit. That night, the remains of the three thousand dollar machine had been staked to Nicky’s front door with a second arrow through its heart—and most of the way through the thick wood.

  Tiffany’s ability with a bow also explained the time she’d brought Greg a thirty-pound slab of fresh bear meat. When he’d later asked if she had any more bear meat she could bring down on the next trip, she’d answered “Too salty for you” and gone on her way. Six months later, after he’d forgotten the whole incident, she’d given him a single pound of bear jerky. He’d shared it with the Judge who decreed, “Girl has finally got it right.” It was the only bear jerky Greg had ever had, but it had been totally amazing.

  He’d had a fantasy or two about Tiffany. She was pretty, at least everything that wasn’t hidden by that oversized sunhat and hippie-loose clothing, and she smelled of pine and fresh river water. Perhaps a little younger than his twenty-nine, perhaps a little older, it was hard to tell. But as she spoke no more to him than to anybody else in town, he didn’t see any point in trying to see if that fantasy led anywhere. But she was almost as intriguing an enigma as Jessica Baxt—